The present disclosure relates to methods and systems for measuring power consumption. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to automated association of power consuming devices with electricity meters.
Energy consumption reporting and control for a device, such as an office device, is becoming more interesting to consumers. As electricity becomes more expensive, and consumers strive to become more environmentally conscious, accurate power consumption and modeling is becoming more important.
Many companies operate large number of office devices such as printers, copiers and multifunction devices (e.g., a single device capable of scanning, printing, faxing and/or copying) at a single time, and would like to accurately model or measure the power consumption at each device, or the power consumed at groups of the devices. Existing techniques for energy modeling or measurement use a variety of methods, each having differing accuracy and precision. Many energy consumption estimation techniques require polling a device to acquire job arrival data, and using some form of power model to describe the devices characteristics such as energy used during various states, and the energy used by a device to transition between the states. However, such an approach can produce inaccurate estimations.
Outlet-level electric meters have recently come to market for use in accurately measuring energy consumption at a device. These meters accurately measure electricity consumption at the device level, and are used for precise energy monitoring, demand/response or load shedding, and energy minimization services and solutions. Wireless electric meters can connect to a network through various wireless protocols (e.g., ZIGBEE®, WiFi, BLUETOOTH®), appearing on the network as an independent entity, i.e., the meter has no explicit connection or information about the device(s) the meter is measuring. In order for a meter to be associated with the device(s), a technician must manually associate the meter with the device(s), making this alternative expensive and time consuming.